SDL on Android

Here’s a quick summary of how I got SDL to work on Android. First off, this is my setup:

Android NDK r6

Android SDK r12

SDL-2.0.0-6284

The first piece of bad news is that Android support is only in the upcoming SDL 2.0, not in the current stable 1.2. Although I’m sure it could be backported, SDL2 is pretty similar, so I decided to upgrade. The README.android file does a pretty good job of explaining the steps, but there were a few kinks:

in jni/src/Android.mk, the line LOCAL_SHARED_LIBRARIES := SDL is wrong. That needs to be SDL2

Java didn’t like that all the classes in src/org/libsdl/app/SDLActivity.java are in one file. I had to make separate SDLMain.java and SDLSurface.java files.

In the onTouch method, I get a compile error (cannot find symbol) for event.getActionIndex() and event.getActionMasked(), so I commented out some of that code and haven’t used touch events yet. I still need to crack this nut.

Because my SDK is installed in C:Googleandroid-sdk-windows, I had to edit local.properties to say sdk.dir=/Google/android-sdk-windows

Now I have one of the SDL test app running on my phone, drawing rectangles. Time to see if I can do something useful with that!